Rapid Prototyping with Protoshare
Posted 9/3/2009 1:36:00 PM by Mark Reichard
Readers of this blog will know that I'm in favor of any tool that helps with requirements definition and project planning for Web projects. I'm convinced that it's the insufficient definition of requirements and a failure to agree on concrete expectations between clients and developers that are the primary cause of failed Web projects.
Just two weeks ago we were called in to consult with a company that had hired a Web vendor and was concerned about the project. From our discussion, it seemed that the vendor was of the "start writing code first and ask questions later" school of Web project management. and their response to several of the clients requests for details about the sit was that all would become clear once they saw the finished site, and that anything the client did not like could just be changed. Just like you would not hire a contractor who planned to build your building first and then find out how you wanted it look and function, you should not hire a Web developer who does not thoroughly research your requirements and draw up a detailed blueprint for the site.
In line with this idea, we've recently started to use a rapid Web prototyping tool for all sites 
that we develop. The tool is called Protoshare (www.protoshare.com), and it allows you to quickly and easily create functional prototypes of Web sites. You can iteratively prototype the site by first specifying which elements (links, text blocks, form fields) will be on each page without specifying details of colors, fonts and images. This allows you to get agreement on the broad outlines of the site. You can then add additional detail by developing CSS sytle sheets for site elements and uploading images. Finally, you can give a designer access to the prototype to develop design comps for key pages, and these comps can be uploaded directly into the site for client review.
We've found this to be an invaluable tool, and the regular enhancement schedule means that there's a good chance that the few gripes we've had with the tool will be resolved soon.
Tags: Project ManagementComments
Determining the impact of a non-profit site
Posted 4/24/2009 11:23:30 AM by Mark Reichard
In our last post we talked about the importance of focusing on the concrete goals that a Web site is supposed to deliver and of measuring the site’s success in accomplishing those goals. We also discussed the difficulty that non-profits, social service agencies and government often have in identifying concrete goals and particularly in devising ways to measure their site’s success at accomplishing goals. In this post we’ll discuss three strategies that non-profits can use to determine how successful their site is in furthering the mission of the organization.
The first and most obvious of these strategies is using a Web analytics package such as Google Analytics (www.google.com/analytics) to monitor traffic to your site. As content and new features are added, you can track visits and page views on the site and determine whether more people are taking advantage of the resources on the site. It stands to reason that increasing traffic indicates that your site is becoming a more valuable resource, while decreasing traffic might indicate the opposite. Using raw visits and pageviews traffic can be problematic however, because raw numbers don’t tell you how visitors came to your site or why. If you want to truly understand how visitors are using your site, it’s important to know which areas of the site are most visited, how users are coming to the site (direct navigation, links from other sites or as a result of finding your site in an Internet search engine like Google). If you’re not getting traffic from search engines, it’s worth researching whether your site appears in search results for terms that are relevant to your site and, if not, to think about search engine optimization for the site.
If you are getting traffic from search engines, it’s a good idea to use your analytics package to understand what search terms users are using to get to your site. These details may tell a substantially different story than the raw data about site visits and pageviews. On the iData site for example, there are a couple of blog posts that have addressed somewhat arcane topics not well covered elsewhere and that rank well in search engines. These posts account for a substantial portion of the traffic to our site, but not they are not really related to our core products and services. If we relied only on overall site traffic to measure the effectiveness of our site, we would not get the complete picture.
Another often recommended strategy involves posting an online survey. Most modern Web Content Management Systems (CMS) such as iData’s Synapse Publisher include an online survey builder component, and there are a variety of free or low cost online tools such as SurveyMonkey (www.surveymonkey.com) that allow organizations to survey their sites’ visitors about how they use the site and what the organization might do better. These surveys can be a valuable tool, particularly when the organization’s understanding of how their site is used is wildly out of line with reality. In such cases, an online survey can provide an important wake-up call to those responsible for managing the site. In many cases however, a survey is of limited use. First of all, most users have been surveyed by so many sites that they will not participate, and they may resent being asked for their input. Also, online surveys may suffer from the same limitations that focus groups often do in the sense that site visitors feel compelled to offer strong opinions even when they do not feel strongly one way or another about your site, so the survey responses may include emphatic statements that exaggerate the importance of the data.
A better way to gauge how the site is used is to incorporate the site into the business processes of the organization. This can be done by encouraging site visitors who need to contact you to do so through online forms with responses emailed to someone in your organization and stored in a database so that they are available for periodic review and reporting. These forms can be developed for any area of your organizations mission where you get information from customers or clients and act on that information. Applications can range from typical contact forms that users fill out to request more information about your products or services to event registration forms that users fill out to register for events or classes. For non-profits, a key part of the organization’s mission is often providing information, which at first glance might not seem amenable to this approach. If the information is important enough to your clients, you could consider requiring users to register before providing the information. Based on our experience, we would exercise caution with this approach, however, because --- particularly in the case of non-profits --- getting critical information out is often more important than measuring who is consuming it. In most cases, using Web analytics reporting to understand how frequently your key information is accessed and downloaded is a better idea.
Two objections that many non-profits have to the idea of incorporating online forms into their business processes are:
- The staff of the agency or organization would often prefer to speak with clients and potential clients who access the site in order to accurate access their needs and be sure that they are pointed in the right direction.
- Wise non-profits and government agencies sometimes do not object to providing an online form but they also want to provide a phone number, email address and mailing address in order to allow site visitors to contact the organization in the way that is most convenient to the visitor.
Both of these issues can be addressed by providing
offline contact methods that are published only through the Web site. These can include a site specific 800 number or phone extension, a Web-site specific PO box or mailstop and a Web-site specific email contact address. Many 800 number services (such as Ring Central ---
www.ringcentral.com) offer detailed reporting on use of the 800 number, and email traffic is easy to track. Using these methods, organizations can provide site visitors a choice of the most convenient way to contact the organization while still providing an accurate picture of the impact of the Web site on the organization.
This post has discussed how non-profits, social service agencies and government can understand the impact that their Web sites have on their operations. The next post in this series will discuss what to do when you get those results --- particularly when you determine that you need to attract more traffic to your site.
Tags: Analytics, Content Management, E-marketing Strategy, Project ManagementComments
Web Project Planning for Government and Non-profits
Posted 9/22/2008 6:39:09 AM by Mark Reichard
This post is the first of three that will deal with Web project planning and execution for non-profits and government agencies. In this post, we discuss how to approach planning a Web project. In the next post, we’ll look at how to measure the impact of a Web project for a non-profit or government agency. The final installment will look at site promotion and search engine optimization for non-profits and government agencies.
When iData carries out Web projects with our clients, we start by reviewing their overall strategy and determining how the Web site and other online initiatives can best support this strategy. As part of this planning exercise, we identify key goals of the organization and we jointly brainstorm conversions --- specific actions that visitors to the organization’s site will take that directly relate to the identified strategic goals.
This sounds simple (and it is), but you’d be surprised how often the focus on strategic goals is lost when Web project teams dive into the detail of actually completing the project. Without a clear, prioritized list of goals and related conversions to guide project planning, project plans can easily fill with junk (design elements that the Marketing VP thinks are cool or features that the tech team wants to do because they can) while the hard, frustrating work of figuring out how to actually accomplish the vital work of the organization online goes undone.
The tendency for focus on strategic goals to be lost seems to vary directly with how involved the site is in e-commerce. For an Internet-only retailer (i.e. a pure e-commerce site), it’s pretty obvious that the focus should be on:
- Getting visitors to the site, and
- Converting visitors to buyers (at a profitable price).
It’s true that some online retailers focus on these fundamentals better than others, but the built in feedback mechanism of the marketplace tends to correct this --- good, usable sites get traffic, make sales, and stay in business while bad sites don’t.
For organizations where the feedback mechanism is not as direct, it is a lot harder to identify online conversions that support the key goals of the organization. I’ve been in a lot of meetings, particularly with non-profits and government agencies, where our clients have been frustrated by our attempts to reduce their project (which until the meeting have been thought of in very lofty, conceptual terms) to the fundamentals of:
- A clear, concise statement of the strategic goals of the organization, and
- A list of concrete things they want visitors to the organization’s site to do and how those actions support strategic goals.
These folks often object that their site is informational and that there is not really an online conversion related to what they are trying to accomplish. In other words, non-profits and government agencies are often primarily trying to inform, educate and advocate, not sell something. How are they supposed to measure and track changes in the perceptions of visitors to the site? How can they tell when someone has become more informed or educated?
These are tough and legitimate questions. It is often more comfortable for agencies and organizations to simply build a site delivers a snappy new look and feel and some cool new online do-dads rather than devote time and energy to soul-searching about the mission of the organization and how to track the Web site’s impact on that mission. But what is most comfortable and what is best for the organization are not necessarily the same. In order to do what’s best for the organization, these questions must be part of the planning process. The reality is that there are a variety of mechanisms (surveys, offline referral source tracking, creative use of contact forms) to measure the impact of a Web site, but implementing them sometimes requires a new level of discipline and adoption of new tools not only through the Web site but in the organization’s offline activities as well. The next post in this series will examine some of these tools.
Tags: Comments